Puttenham, about an hour’s drive from London, has fewer than 2,500 residents and is famous for its ancient church; its friendly pub, the Good Intent; and its proud inclusion in both the Domesday Book — an 11th-century survey of English lands — and “Brave New World.” Unhappily for many people here, it is also famous for being featured on lists of good places to go “dogging” — that is, to have sex in public, sometimes with partners you have just met online, so that others can watch. So popular is the woodsy field below the ridge as a spot for gay sex (mostly during the day) and heterosexual sex (mostly at night) that the police have designated it a “public sex environment.”

❍ Philly officers in 25th District probe were not sting targets

Investigators who set up a sting operation Monday had hoped to snare two corrupt Philadelphia police officers suspected of robbing drug dealers – just not the two who fell into the trap. The 25th District officers arrested Monday, Sean Alivera and his partner, Christopher Luciano, were not the initial targets of the investigation and were not previously suspected of wrongdoing, sources familiar with the case said. A confidential informant had identified two other officers as associates of a local drug dealer and had helped set up a sting to catch them robbing a courier of cash and marijuana. The courier was actually an undercover officer.

A Montana woman has been charged with criminal mischief after allegedly taking a crowbar to a controversial art museum display in Colorado that critics say portrays Jesus Christ receiving oral sex from another man.

The destruction of the Enrique Chagoya “The Misadventures of the Romantic Cannibals” at the Loveland Museum Gallery was the direct result of the inflammatory and false descriptions of the print in the press and by those protesting it’s inclusion in our exhibition. The controversial image has been demonized as “pornographic”, “obscene” and “depicting Jesus in a sex act” when this is not the truth.

“Of course” Muslims should be able to build the Cordoba House Islamic cultural center in New York City, Margie J. Phelps told TPMMuckraker in an interview Thursday. She said it would be hypocritical for the United States to not allow construction to proceed, and called opponents of the mosque un-American.

Couple who took part in Oath Keepers online discussion forum have child snatched in shocking new level of police state persecution

“Charlie the smoking chimp” used to put two fingers to his mouth to mimic smoking and reach out with his other hand to bum cigarette butts from visitors at Bloemfontein Zoo. But when videos of him puffing away circulated globally a few years ago, zoo officials moved to cut off the supply of smokes.

❍ Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic

Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving. The car is a project of Google, which has been working in secret but in plain view on vehicles that can drive themselves, using artificial-intelligence software that can sense anything near the car and mimic the decisions made by a human driver.

In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.